What's In A Name?
by eleventhirtyfour
Summary: A series of vignettes drabbles that try to answer the questions we've all asked ourselves. Rating T for language.
1. Partner

AN: I don't think there are any specific spoilers but be warned - I've been watching a lot of Season Six lately on the iTunes…

Oh and please be gentle with me, I'm new to this game grin

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Partner.

It's a word that I say, what, a dozen? Twenty times a day? I'm always referring to my partner, introducing her to the people we interview – "I'm Detective Goren, this is my partner, Detective Eames." But what does it really mean?

I've often been accused of over-thinking things. I don't have to think about this – I know what I mean when I say it. But lately I've been thinking, what does she mean when she says it?

Like with my brother, that day on the street. Asked if she was my wife. No, assumed it. Sure, we play that game, leverage our odd-couple pairing and hard-won sixth sense of each other to get the perps to spill the goods. But if my own (drug-addled-gambling-addict-homeless-fuckup-of-a) brother looks at us and thinks that…

Well, I'll be honest. When I say it, I am referring to a deep connection. It's more than marriage. How many marriages do we come across every day in the course of our investigations that are devoid of any sense of two people coming together in any sort of partnership, let alone the one I conjure with that word? Eames and I, we hand our lives to each other every morning when we walk in the squad and I'm not even talking about Eames' driving. Earlier this year when all that shit went down, with the Gages and that case out on Long Island… sometimes it all crystallizes in a convergence of events that makes you question everything you ever felt, every word you ever said. The clarity that comes shortly after those moments of gut-twisting, brain-burning fear.

So what kind of partner have I been lately? Yeah, I know I've been a complete shit. My mother is busy raging against the dying of the light, and all I can do is push away the one person who's always been there for me. The one person who never questioned, took care of me, my partner. Hell, I didn't even tell Eames until I had to let it slip to push a perp. That's not usually the way I like to reveal the details of my personal life to any of my friends, least of all my partner. I've been withdrawing into myself lately, pulling back those tentacles of emotional connection that slowly crept out over the last five years and started to draw Eames into my own twisted little world. I'm getting ready. Because when Mom is gone, I'm not sure what's going to be left of me.

There is that danger, being trained as a profiler, that eventually you will start to profile yourself. And as Dec said, I could have gone either way. I still could.


	2. Bobby

Bobby.

I've always wondered and never quite found the right way to ask why a 6'4" towering bear of a man with the perfectly respectable and melodious Christian name of Robert would introduce himself as "Bobby". What about "Bob" or "Rob" or even "Bert"? Why "Bobby"? Do you suppose at some point, maybe when he first realized that he surpassed his father's height, or the first time he sensed somebody back down in real fear when he warmed them up with those lungs of his, he decided that going by "Bobby" made him less threatening?

I guess another reason could be simply that his mother calls him that. A lot of us get stuck with our mothers' personalities expressed in the form of our first names. Luckily some of us also have big brothers who will shorten our pretty-princess names at the first opportunity to something that makes us just another one of the boys. Ensuring we won't get made fun of in the squad in later life. Because with the last name Eames you practically get assigned a badge number from birth. Even if you're a girl.

Maybe that's why that Peter guy from a few weeks back caused my hackles to rise so fast when he just tossed that "Alexandra" out there. I almost jumped up and socked him one. Shades of the playground and that time Billy Miles from down the street cut off my right pigtail, purple ribbon and all, and I asked my big brother's girlfriend to cut my hair to even it out before mom got home. God, how Mom cried over my hair. You'd think Billy cut off my right arm. And Ross… was I interrupting something? Yeah, just the barely suppressed outrage of a ten year old girl who wanted nothing more than to be one of the guys…

Strangely, though, Bobby's name has always tripped right off my tongue. Because despite the fact that I've never known exactly why he chose it, I know what works. And his name just… works. I can't imagine him by any other name.

AN: Bonus points if you picked up my leetle pop culture reference. Double bonus points if you know who Billy Miles is, too (I swear, that name just slipped in there).


	3. Alex

Alex.

It's a nice enough name. Short. To the point. Easy to spell. So why is it that I never use it?

Have you ever known somebody, even when you were a kid, who you couldn't look in the eye because they just intimidated the shit out of you, and you knew if you looked up into their eyes that you would drop dead or go crazy or shatter into a million pieces and they would know how fucking scared of them you really were.

Yeah, that's right big old Robert Goren is scaring to fucking death of his tiny little partner, Ms. Alex Eames. You got a problem with that?

If you are a cop you get called by your last name. Briscoe. Green. Logan. Barek. Ross. Wheeler. I think it's something we all start doing along about the same time we start tossing around the other jargon of our profession, in the academy. How we call ambulances "buses" and things like that. It was the same in the service. Well, we also called each other a lot of names I wouldn't use in polite company now. But, same deal. Hell, I bet most of those guys didn't even know my first name, let alone call me by any diminutive form of it. I always thought it was a defense mechanism. It's stylized, it's ritual. It helps keep us aware of where we are, what our responsibilities are. It keeps us in the job.

So why does Eames insist on calling me Bobby? And more to the point, why can't I just reciprocate, despite all my posturing and protesting that speaking in last names is just what cops do?

I think we all know the answer to this one, say it with me now: because I'm afraid of her. I'm afraid of the power that would be unleashed if I uttered that name aloud. Afraid that I would end up weeping in the fetal position on the floor at her feet, confessing every impure thought I ever had, professing her my undying … partnership.


	4. Love

Love. I have no idea what the word means anymore.

At one point I thought I had a pretty good handle on it. At the end of some of our really long, grueling cases where Bobby and I stared evil right in the eyes and didn't flinch, and he would glance over to check on me that way that he does. That look. That was filed in my mental rolodex under "L".

Sometimes when he doesn't audibly groan at my wise-cracks or snappy re-statements of the baldly obvious, there's an undercurrent there. A barely perceptible smile plays at the corner of his mouth. Suddenly he's not all carefully scripted, closely controlled actions. When I see his armor chink like that, well I always thought that might have something to do with love.

There are Greek words for this, aren't there? Didn't Bobby himself tell me once? Different flavors of love, different moods of love. I'm not sure about any of it, anymore.

I just know that he's shutting me out, and I can't figure out why.


	5. Father

A/N – My own (completely unworthy) post-Endgame thoughts. I will have to work on this some more in future. I just have so much trouble imagining what it must be like to suddenly find out that you're not who you think you are. As someone with my own skeletons… what if somebody told me there was a chance that my dad was not my dad after all? And what if it was EVEN WORSE than you thought? Not to mention all the other shit that's happened to our favorite detectives… and Bobby's obvious drinking & overeating problems this season. "You're not taking care of yourself," indeed!

**Father.**

What makes somebody a father? Is it simply DNA? Is it that momentary exchange of bodily fluids that culminates in the silent knitting together of a human being from mysterious, infinitesimal building blocks into a 6'4" wild-eyed overweight drunk with nothing going for him except that he DIDN'T strangle his biological father while two prison guards watched silently from the corners of the room? Is it the mind games that grown men can play with innocent children… of 46?

Or is a father something else entirely, something I have never seen before? Does a father host Thanksgiving dinner with his two boys, their mother, and her new husband, maintaining strained civility for the sake of the children? Does a father take one for the team, sacrificing his job so another hot-head can live out a second chance? Does a father ask all the right questions from the sidelines, making sure the kid thinks he figured it out for himself? Does a father come to basketball games and watch proudly from the sidelines, lie and cheat and steal to give his son everything he ever wanted? Does a father take weekly trips out to visit his mother and call her every night?

I always thought Father was a dirty word - it certainly was the way that my mother said it. But to question that my father was a handsome, feckless rake who broke my addled mother's heart and left my 14 year old self to protect her. Imagine, all this time I had my father's attention. Well, when he wasn't raping and photographing and killing dozens of beautiful women.

And so I sit here, my heart is completely broken. The one woman I could have loved… oh GOD, that's the phrase he used… well, she's gone. Off solving cases with the hot-head. I hope to heaven Mike doesn't get her killed. Because then I would definitely be lost.


End file.
